The ALSA Utilities package contains various utilities which are useful for controlling your sound card.
Download (HTTP): http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa/ftp/utils/alsa-utils-1.0.4.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/utils/alsa-utils-1.0.4.tar.bz2
Download size: 140 KB
Estimated Disk space required: 3.2 MB
Estimated build time: 0.08 SBU
Install ALSA Utilities by running the following commands:
patch -Np1 -i ../alsa-utils-1.0.4-arecord-1.patch &&
./configure &&
make &&
make install
Probably the easiest way to store mixer levels is to set and retrieve them using a bootscript. It is possible to do this with a post-install line in /etc/modules.conf but this is left as an exercise for those readers who wish to do this.
The ALSA Driver package installs a script as /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound. While it is possible to use this script, it contains a lot of extraneous detail which isn't needed on an LFS system. Instead, install the init script /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsa included in the blfs-bootscripts-5.1 package.
make install-alsa
Note that all channels of your sound card are muted by default. You can use the alsamixer program from ALSA Utilities (or any other OSS mixer) to change this.
The first time the above script is run, it will complain that there is no state in /etc/asound.state. You can prevent this by running the following commands after installing ALSA Utilities:
touch /etc/asound.state &&
alsactl store
A final note is that the lines loading sfxload are commented out. They are there as an example of other things you may wish to do in the startup script. sfxload is a separate package of interest to SoundBlaster AWE and Live! users. It is designed for loading "sound-fonts" (which are used for MIDI output). You may wish to delete these lines and add your own or, if you have the relevant sound card, install sfxload and uncomment them.
The ALSA Utilities package contains aconnect, alsactl, alsamixer, amixer, aplay, arecord and aseqnet.
aconnect is a utility for connecting and disconnecting two existing ports in the ALSA sequencer system.